Foner, professor of history at Columbia and a prominent historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1989 for Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. He has the distinction that year of losing out to not one book but two. For the first and only time, two books were awarded in the category of history: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson, and Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963, by Taylor Branch. Foner won the prestigious Bancroft Prize that same year.

Among this year’s class of research fellows at The Huntington are a number of Pulitzer finalists: Sean Wilentz, finalist in 2006 for The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, finalist in 2003 for Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America; and Daniel K. Richter, finalist in 2002 for Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America.

You can listen to lectures by Horowitz and Wilentz on The Huntington’s iTunes U site. Both hold fellowships named for the Los Angeles Times: Horowitz is the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow this year, and Wilentz is the Los Angeles Times Fellow. Of course, The Los Angeles Times is winner of many Pulitzer Prizes, including one this year for public service reporting for its stories about the corruption in the city of Bell, Calif. While on iTunes, be sure to listen to a talk by political scientist Raphael Sonenshein, of California State University, Fullerton, who made good use of those Times’ stories in his Haynes Foundation Lecture about that scandal.

Offerings on iTunes also include talks by Pulitzer Prize winners Annette Gordon-Reed, Daniel Walker Howe, James M. McPherson, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. And in May, be sure to mark your calendars for lectures in Friends’ Hall by Wilentz (May 23) and Mary Beth Norton (May 26), a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1997 for her book Founding Mothers and Fathers. She was, fittingly, the Los Angeles Times Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington in 2008-09.